The Heiress vs the Establishment: Mrs. Campbell's Campaign for Legal Justice

Christopher English is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland and the author of A Cautious Beginning: The Emergence of
Newfoundland’s Supreme Court of Judicature in 1791–92.

This is an entertaining and engrossing reconstruction of how Elizabeth
Bethune Campbell—a Toronto-born socialite with little formal, and no
legal, education—pursued to the highest court of the British
Commonwealth her charge that the trustee of her mother’s estate had
defrauded it and the legal heirs to his own advantage. Her moral victory
was complete as she successfully argued her case in front of the Law
Lords of the Privy Council in London in 1930. But her principled and
stubborn 14-year struggle incurred irredeemable costs. Relations with
her siblings were forever poisoned; her absence from home and family put
severe strains on her marriage; the legal fraternity—lawyers, judges,
and the law society—were almost completely united against her; the
financial benefits of victory were modest and further depleted by more
years spent in trying to collect and in pursuing still unresolved
grievances against those who had stood in her way. Ultimately she stood
alone, Lear-like in her nobility and flaws, buffeted but unbowed by the
storms of adversity, frustration, and, perhaps, clinical insanity.

Constance and Nancy Backhouse offer an informed and fair commentary on
Mrs. Campbell’s own account, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1940), which
is published here in full. There are fine and evocative illustrations,
especially portraits of the dramatis personae. The whole saga is
critical of the closed, chummy, self-protective nature of the Ontario
legal profession in the interwar years. Accountability, transparency,
and barriers against conflict of interest were in short supply and,
according to Christopher Moore’s The Law Society of Upper Canada and
Ontario’s Lawyers, 1797–1997, they went unaddressed for almost
another half century. This account is a compelling page-turner that can
be savoured in a single session.